Aug 08, 2008

A federal judge ruled yesterday that the government owes Native American plaintiffs $455 million for mismanaging and withholding mineral royalties, grazing fees, and other revenues overseen by the Department of Interior. The ruling was a setback for the plaintiffs, who were seeking $47 billion in a case that has dragged on for twelve long years.

In fact, the name of the case has changed through the years with each new Secretary of the Interior. When plaintiff Elouise Cobell, a Blackfoot Indian, filed the case in June 1996 as a class action on behalf of herself and half a million other Native Americans, it was Cobell v. Babbitt. By the time of the ruling of U.S. District Judge James Robertson yesterday, it was Cobell v. Kempthorne.

The legal saga has been nearly as astonishing as the story of government incompetence.

The origins of the case date back to 1887,
when the federal government divided up millions of acres of reservation
land and parceled it out to individual Native Americans. According to that 1887 law, known as the Dawes Act,
the Indians were not considered capable of actual ownership. Thus the
land was put into trusts for the individual Indians, with the U.S.
government acting as trustee. Proceeds of the oil and mineral leasing
rights were supposed to be paid into the Indian trusts, but the
government accounting system was sloppy from the beginning, and it only got
worse over the next 100 years.

Cobell's own story
is almost mythic. At the age of 30, she became treasurer of the
Blackfoot Nation, and immediately discovered the accounts were in total
chaos. When she sought answers from the Interior Department's Bureau
of Indian Affairs, they either insulted or ignored her. After more
than a decade of banging her head into bureaucratic walls, she found an
official who lent her a sympathetic ear, and introduced her to a
banking lawyer named Dennis Gingold, known for his hard-charging
style. He couldn't believe the kind of run-around Cobell had been
getting.

Although she had little idea where the funds would come from, Cobell
was persuaded to file one of the largest ever class-action lawsuits, on
June 10, 1996. It was filed in Washington, D.C., and assigned to Judge
Royce Lamberth. The following year, Cobell won a MacArthur Foundation "genius award" and plowed all of the funds into the litigation. Other foundations anteed up through the years.

Lamberth had worked for the Justice Department for years before
becoming a judge. A native Texan, a big boot-wearing man who loves to
laugh, and a staunch Republican, he also had no stomach for
bureaucratic foot-dragging or for being misled. Over the course of
dealing with the Cobell case, he gradually came to believe he had been
badly dissed. In December 1999, he issued a 126-page opinion lambasting
the government for "a shocking pattern of deception. I have never seen
more egregious conduct by the federal government."

Other opinions followed, with Lamberth using increasingly more
intemperate language as he held first one Secretary and then the next
in contempt of court, along with the Justice Department lawyers
representing them, for their failure to handle the trust funds
properly, to respond to his queries truthfully, and to handle matters in a
timely fashion. At one point, he found Interior computer records to be so insecure that he ordered all computers at the department to be
disconnected from the internet.

After several more opinions in the case, including one in July 2005
when Lamberth wrote that the Interior Department was "a dinosaur--the
morally and culturally oblivious hand-me-down of a disgracefully racist
and imperialist government that should have been buried a century ago,"
the Justice Department petitioned the D.C. appeals court for his removal from
the case. In July 2006, a three-judge panel of that court agreed, and
wrote: "We conclude, reluctantly, that this is one of those rare cases
in which reassignment is necessary."

The case was reassigned to James Robertson, who, in April 2007,
ordered a trial looking into the adequacy of the government's handling of the
trust account records.

His ruling in favor of the plaintiffs could be called a
Pyrrhic victory. At one time, a study commissioned by the Interior Department
itself had warned that the government's liability could be as high as
$40 billion. Last year the plaintiffs rejected a proposal by the
government to settle the case for $7 billion.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs argued that the government has
improperly benefited from its mismanagement of the trusts. But Judge Robertson took issue with the plaintiffs' methods
for calculating the missing royalties and appeared to side with
government lawyers, who argued that there were only several hundred
million dollars in dispute.

A spokesman for the plaintiffs told the New York Times that the judge
"basically accepted the government's argument that not that much money
is missing."

The ruling did not address the question of how to award the money; hearings on that issue are scheduled for later this month. There is
also the possibility of a settlement. Cobell said she is "disappointed" by the ruling, and is
considering whether or not to appeal. "We believe we presented a strong, compelling case that individual Indian trust beneficiaries are entitled to much more than the government's admitted mismanagement of our trust monies over the past 120 years," she said.

BOOZHOO, MY NAME IS NICOLE I AM A OJIBWA...NATIVE AMERICAN WOMEN I JUST WANT TO GIVE THANKS TO MS.ELOUISE COBELL FOR TAKING THIS MUCH OF YOUR TIME FOR ALL OF US, NOT JUST FOR YOURSELF!!! I WANT YOU TO KNOW THE NEWS HIT THE INDIAN COMMUNITY AND WE ARE BEHIND YOU 100%!! I WISH THE BEST FOR YOU.....IN HELPING ALL OF US!!!! I JUST NOW HEARD ABOUT THIS I DONT KNOW ALL THE DETAILS BUT I WILL!! THE LITTLE I DO KNOW I AM WITH YOU ELOUISE, I RESPECT YOU AND EVERYTHING YOUR ABOUT MIIGWECH MS. COBELL YOUR A STRONG NATIVE AMERICAN WOMEN AND YOUR CONTRIBUTING TO YOUR NATIVE PEOPLE SOMETHING I ALSO WANT TO DO BEFORE I RETURN TO THE SPIRIT WORLD!!! GEGAWABAMIN MINAWA.... MAY THE CREATOR BE WITH US THREW OUT THIS MIIGWECH SINCERLY "NICOLE"

Interesting, but how much of that goes back to the people?... How much of it will go back to their Tribal Governments?... Having said that, I pity the tribes that have their Tribal leaders on the forefront of these actions that don't support or put any effort into the cause, but benefit from thereof.